The 4.1.1 XMP Toolkit (SDK) has been finalized and moved to the Adobe’s Developers Center. The 4.1 Toolkit is now available under the BSD license for open source developers.

Although the previous Adobe open source license is quite open, we decided that is was best to use a standard open source license that is respected in the open source community. Opensource.org was invaluable in reviewing the many different open source licenses that are available.

The 4.1.1 XMP release is significant because it include the source code for developers to read, write and update XMP in popular image, document and video file formats including JPEG, PSD, TIFF, AVI, WAV, MPEG, MP3, MOV, INDD, PS, EPS and PNG.

MNR is getting the word out! If you are developer or just interested in how extensible CS3 can really be, you have to attend the online Developer Update on May 3.

There will be great coverage on the amazing extensibility of Bridge – such as using custom Flash UI with in Bridge to create your own features. If you are a metadata head, we will also cover what’s new in the XMP Toolkit as well as scripting features in Bridge and VC. Speaking of VC, if you are interested in hooking up your asset management system directly to CS3, the Version Cue SDK is what you need to know about – it reduces the complexity of integration significantly.

It’s one of those things that you see everyday on TV and maybe wonder how they do that. If you have ever seen baseball scores overlaid on video of the game, or titles under news personalities – those graphics are created in real time with tools created by companies such as Chyron.

Just got a demo from the nice folks at Chyron while I am at NAB on their latest implementation of XMP – very cool. Basically they are using XMP to carry title and caption information in the image that would be broadcast – so for example, if there is a TIFF of the sports player, the XMP in the TIFF would contain the player’s name. The image is brought into the Chyron tools where the title graphics and animation is then added. The player’s name in the XMP is directly read and show in the title graphics.

What is cool about this is that using XMP to carry this info reduces the errors that can happen in rekeying infomation and reassociating it with the image – now the image describes itself. As my tagline states – the message is in the medium.

It helps reduce the errors that can happen such as labeling a republican a democrat and viceaversa – gaffs that can easily land you on the Daily Show.

Yes it has finally arrived, the Bridge CS3 SDK. If you are a Flash and Javascript developer you should be doubly psyched – Bridge’s extensibility is based on using Javascript to create extensions and communicate to other applications. Bridge also incorporates the Flash player which means you can design interactive UIs for use within Bridge.

* BridgeTalk – communication protocol to talk with other apps – get them to do some work

If you are serious about connecting Bridge to an digital asset management (DAM) system then you need to check out the Version Cue SDK. This SDK is focused on making it really simple to connect the Adobe CS3 products, especially Bridge, to your DAM implementation. My product manager colleague Mike Wallen has done a great job of providing an overview and a demo of the SDK.

Bridge CS3 has significantly updated it’s UI, especially in the area of displaying camera specific metadata. Wade Heninger, UI designer for Bridge has this to say about the design:

“The push for this design was two fold:

1. To represent photographic data in a form that was quick to recognize because it speaks the photo shorthand photogs were used to with their cameras

2. We could maximize the metadata presentation – it lets us put 11 items in the space normally reserved for 4 or 5 items in a scrolling list. Furthermore, it put like-items near to each other in a grid that was easy to memorize.”

I’ve a cheat sheet to some of the other icons that are shown in the placard below

Jim King is one of our most respected senior scientists at Adobe. I worked with him on a metadata presentation (pdf) back in late 2004 on metadata for Seybold. It was one of my first major demos in front of a couple hundred people, went off without a hitch!

Often when I describe XMP I have a slide that describes metadata as the labels on the cans – without labels you wouldn’t know whether it was soup or spam. Metadata is the ingredients label for media – so to speak. Or maybe it’s the best before label…

The IPTC and Dublin Core are the granddaddy of standards. I believe it was Photoshop 4 that first began to embed IPTC metadata in images as IIM records. The IPTC standard grew out of the old school process of send images “across the wire” between news agencies.

For Photoshop CS2, Adobe, IDEAlliance and IPTC worked together to update the standard to IPTC Core which is based on XMP. XMP is very extensible – meaning it can store many different types of metadata easily, and it is unicode, which means it can easily work with multiple character sets such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic – very important as the next Olympic Games will be in China!

The IPTC is organizing it’s first Photo Metadata Conference on 7th of June, in Florence Italy in conjunction with the CEPIC conference. Tough gig going to Italy, but I will be there with Peter Krogh and David Riecks to talk about XMP, photographer’s workflows and controlled vocabularies respectively.

When Adobe developed XMP way back before the turn of the century, RDF was still in not fully out of womb. But we saw great potential and based the XMP platform on a simplified version of RDF.

RDF is the building block for the semantic web as envisioned by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It basically is a way to describe the world in simple three part sentences similar to subject-verb-object. XMP simplified this further since it is describing the file itself – so we removed the object – loosely speaking since it was inferred.

XMP is mostly embedded in the files that it describes, there are a few cases such as with Camera Raw where we cannot embed the metadata since the file format does not allow it, so it sits as a “sidecar” (as in motorcycle sidecar) file.

I met up with Jon Phillips at Creative Commons last week to talk about what’s been happening with CC lately. A few years back I invited Larry Lessig to come to Adobe to talk about Free Culture – as always he put on a great talk. I’ve always been a big believer on enabling the spectrum between public domain and copyright with metadata. We even created a few XMP templates to use to stamp your media with CC licenses.

Now Adobe has a customizable media browser and a set of open source metadata libraries for writing licenses directly into media files. Later this month we will post the Bridge CS3 SDK. The most exciting development is the ability to create Flash panels within Bridge and hook them up to the metadata libraries using Javascript. These types of extensions to the Bridge platform can make it easier for creatives to better control how their creative works should be used.